Perspectives

I’m not a professional herding dog trainer - not even close. But I have trained the last several border collies I’ve used in my sheep business, and I have worked at understanding livestock handling and behavior - especially with sheep. One of the things I’ve observed with starting a young dog on sheep is that at first, most of my dogs want to work much too closely to the sheep. As a result, the dog can only see a very small part of the flock. Part of my job as the trainer, then, is to help the dog back off - to help the dog realize that he or she has more control over the entire flock if they work from further away. In other words, with greater distance comes more perspective.

Distance can be physical or temporal - measured in space or time. The further back my dog can work and still exert control over the sheep, the more effective he’ll be. The further away I get from the traumatic events of 2023, the more I see them with clarity. I don’t know if I understand what happened any more definitively than I did 25 months ago, but I am able to think about some of these events in a new light.

Before delving into several of the ways my perspective has evolved, I should say that I’ve come to realize that one does not “graduate” from the grieving process. There is no “certificate of completion” - as I’ve written before, my relationship with grief continues to evolve. But grief is not something I’ll move past. Indeed, my grief is not something I want to move past. Moving forward with my grief seems to make more sense. And so I suspect my perspective on Sami’s illness and death will always be evolving.

Over these last two years, I’ve found that reading about grief and loss has mostly been beneficial. Of particular help have been A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis, No Death, No Fear by Thich Nhat Hanh, and most recently, This Ordinary Stardust by Alan Townsend.

Dr. Townsend is the Dean of the Franke College of Forestry and Conservation at the University of Montana. As I was blogging in real time about Sami’s glioblastoma diagnosis and treatment in the spring of 2023, he reached out to me to share that he had lost his wife Diana (who was also a scientist) to the same disease several years before. His book is an account of her illness and the aftermath of her passing. I won’t attempt to summarize his writing, but I highly recommend it.

The book came out last spring, and when I received my copy, I found that I wasn’t ready yet to read about someone else’s experience with losing a partner. About ten days ago, I finally picked it up - and I finished reading it one evening this week. In many ways, Alan and Diana’s experience was very similar to mine and Sami’s - and so I found much of it difficult to read. I found myself reliving our experience. I frequently found myself crying and putting the book down. But as I reflected on the book after I finished it Wednesday evening, I realized that Alan’s story helped me gain some important perspective on our own journey with brain cancer. I’m sure more revelations will come.

At some point between Sami’s first and second craniotomy in February 2023, she told me that if she decided she didn’t want any more treatment, I needed to let her make that decision. I agreed, but she also said something about taking her own life. Since she was a large animal veterinarian with access to powerful euthanasia drugs, I knew she had the ability to act on that idea. We secured the drugs (and I bought a gun safe to replace the locked cabinet where I stored my hunting rifles), but I found the thought of Sami ending her own life terribly upsetting at the time. Later, when she was in the hospital at UCSF, she said something to a nurse or a resident about these thoughts. That evening, we had to have an observer in the room with us all night, just in case. The next day, a therapist interviewed her and determined that she wasn’t going to act on the idea - she simply wanted some control over what was happening to her. Looking back now, I realize that Sami was fearless in the face of certain death (there is, after all, no cure for glioblastoma), but the process of dying - of losing her physical and intellectual capacity - was terrifying. I realize now that she wanted some say in how long she’d need to live with the tumors in her brain, and the debilitating symptoms they caused.

I also realize now that she began the process of dying when she had the first major seizure in late May 2023. A week after that seizure, we were in San Francisco, where her medical team determined she was having ongoing subclinical seizures - seizures we couldn’t see, but episodes that were further eroding her ability to walk and speak. Episodes that increased her brain fog. I suspect I knew at the time that her physical and mental toughness were masking the severity of her symptoms - that while we knew how sick she was, her medical team had no frame of reference. They couldn’t really comprehend what a badass she was - and that she knew better than anyone what was happening to her.

The last two weeks of her life, I think, represent the most difficult stretch of my life, too - at least so far. In many ways, the two weeks she spent in hospice care are still a blur - I can still remember specific images and experiences, but mostly I remember my own exhaustion. And my fear that Sami would linger - that I wouldn’t have enough stamina or fortitude to take care of her. In this regard, I am so grateful to our daughters for sharing these difficult days with me. After reading Alan’s book, I was able to see those last two weeks differently. Today, they don’t seem any less difficult, but I do think now that Sami wanted to live until her whole family could be with her (and knowing Sami, so we could be with each other once she’d left us). Wednesday evening, as I finished Alan’s book, I remembered the afternoon of August 10 or 11, when Sami and I were sitting side-by-side on her bed. By that time, both of our daughters were with us, as was Sami’s sister and my own sister and brother-in-law. I put my arm around her, and she rested her head on my shoulder - it was the last time we embraced each other. Early in the morning of August 13, 2023, she slipped away, in our bedroom, with all of us around her. I can’t bring myself to say it was beautiful, but today, I’m grateful that we were there for her. That we were there together. For each other.

Finally, in the winter after Sami passed, I participated in several virtual workshops associated with a social science research project I’d been collaborating on with a colleague from Idaho. One of the sheep producers who participated had young children, and we talked about the realities of livestock production. Like my daughters, her children had participated in the realities of ranch life. The fact that we raise animals for meat (which requires death) while caring deeply for the animals in our care. I couldn’t help it. I asked if she thought ranching gave us a different perspective on life (and death). She answered, “Yes. I think caring for our animals - knowing that their lives sustain ours - prepares our hearts for harder things.” As a veterinarian, Sami had sat with friends who had to make difficult end-of-life decisions. As a rancher, I’d had to make some of those decisions myself. Those decisions are never easy; but my direct participation in them helped prepare me for the biological and existential realities of what our family experienced.

During these last 25 months, gaining this perspective hasn’t been a linear process. I’ve tried some online group grief therapy, which hasn’t been terribly helpful. I’ve tried some one-on-one counseling (both in person and virtual) - some of which has been enormously beneficial, some of which was not. For me, I’m realizing, reading, quiet contemplation, and vulnerability (through my writing and through conversations with friends) have been the most helpful ways for me to understand my grief. I have also realized that there is no single path through grief - that while grief may be the most universal of human emotions, we each experience it - and cope with it - differently. Distance, at least for me, has provided perspective.